Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts

The Visual Arts Department offers courses in painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, computing in the arts, film, video, photography, and art history/criticism (including that of film and video). A bachelor's degree from this department provides students with a solid liberal arts background and is preparatory training for careers as artists, art historians, filmmakers, video artists, photographers, digital media artists, art critics, and for graduate study in art history and fine arts. It also provides students the initial skills required for teaching and work in museums, television, and the commercial film, photography, and Internet industries. The faculty of the Visual Arts Department is composed of actively producing artists and scholars, engaged in research and study concerned with the reconsideration and reevaluation of artistic productions, their information structure, and significance. Consequently, a flexible program of introductory courses has been devised to provide students opportunities to learn about the contexts and practices of significantly different aesthetic and communication structures. A studio course, covering time-based work, as well as drawing, painting, and sculpture, is presented to bring the student into direct contact with the real contingencies compelling redistribution of aesthetic attitudes and reinterpretation of genres. Because of the exploratory nature of our program, the department also emphasizes new media and interdisciplinary practices that would traditionally be considered to have scant relation to the visual arts. These include courses on speculative design, social practice, computing, performance, and theory. In addition to art practice, our curriculum in art history looks at the global context for contemporary art with courses on Chinese, Latin American, including Pre-Columbian, Native American, and Oceanic art, as well as European art from antiquity to the present.

To be considered for admission, you must have completed secondary school with a superior average in academic subjects and have earned a certificate of completion that enables you to be admitted to a university in your home country and is equivalent to a U.S. high school diploma.
Non-California residents, including International applicants, must earn a GPA of 3.4 (or better) with no grade lower than a C.
Internet-based- 83
Paper-based- 550
IELTS minimum score of 7 (Academic module)